The Hampstead Mystery eBook

lack of money from carrying out his original intention
of erecting a fine symmetrical house. The first
story was well enough—­an imposing, massive,
colonnaded front in the Greek style, with marble pillars
supporting the entrance. But the two stories
surmounting this failed lamentably to carry on the
pretentious design. Viewed from the front, they
looked as though the builder, after erecting the first
story, had found himself in pecuniary straits, but,
determined to finish his house somehow, had built two
smaller stories on the solid edifice of the first.
For the two second stories were not flush with the
front of the house, but reared themselves from several
feet behind, so that the occupants of the bedrooms
on the first story could have used the intervening
space as a balcony. Viewed from the rear, the
architectural imperfections of the upper part of the
house were in even stronger contrast with the ornamental
first story. Apparently the impecunious builder,
by the time he had reached the rear, had completely
run out of funds, for on the third floor he had failed
altogether to build in one small room, and had left
the unfinished brickwork unplastered.

The large open space between the house and the fir
plantation had once been laid out as an Italian garden
at the cost of much time and money, but Sir Horace
Fewbanks had lacked the taste or money to keep it up,
and had allowed it to become a luxuriant wilderness,
though the sloping parterres and the centre flowerbeds
still retained traces of their former beauty.
The small lake in the centre, spanned by a rustic hand-bridge,
was still inhabited by a few specimens of the carp
family—­sole survivors of the numerous gold-fish
with which the original designer of the garden had
stocked the lake.

Sir Horace Fewbanks had rented Riversbrook as a town
house for some years before his death, having acquired
the lease cheaply from the previous possessor, a retired
Indian civil servant, who had taken a dislike to the
place because his wife had gone insane within its walls.
Sir Horace had lived much in the house alone, though
each London season his daughter spent a few weeks
with him in order to preside over the few Society
functions that her father felt it due to his position
to give, and which generally took the form of solemn
dinners to which he invited some of his brother judges,
a few eminent barristers, a few political friends,
and their wives. But rumour had whispered that
the judge and his daughter had not got on too well
together—­that Miss Fewbanks was a strange
girl who did not care for Society or the Society functions
which most girls of her age would have delighted in,
but preferred to spend her time on her father’s
country estate, taking an interest in the villagers
or walking the country-side with half a dozen dogs
at her heels.